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Most Recent Posts

I’m delighted to be able to tell you that Kobo are selling Together for Christmas through December at 99p! This is a fabulous promotion, a marvellous opportunity to start reading my books at a really low price. I’m very happy that Kobo have chosen Together for Christmas as this novel is set during the Great War and is my centenary anniversary book to celebrate such a...

I wrote last time about revision, and I’ll return to revision here. It’s one of my favorite topics, because revision is one of my favorite activities. Yes, of course, the doing over can be frustrating. My first drafts have a way, initially, of seeming . . . well, not perfect—I always assume the need to polish—but pretty darned good. And then there is the...

I love being an old lady. I love the gifts age brings every single day. This is what rising to an old-lady day looks like: I am first up, and I motion our two little dogs into action. They tumble down the stairs ahead of me, eager for a brief encounter with the back yard, then breakfast. And while they are rejoicing in their own routine, I slip into mine: emptying the...

I sold a book yesterday. Well, not yesterday-yesterday. I’m writing this in August, trying to clear uncluttered space for the longer project I’m working on, so I sold the book in my yesterday, not yours. Not sold-sold, either. No contract. That will be months away. Certainly no advance. More months. But an e-mail to my agent saying the editor “LOVES”...

So many voices and messages say take the leap. The future isn't a foregone conclusion. It is hard to keep looking through that lens when I witness the advance of dementia slowly but inexorably consuming my father. And yet, if I couldn't heed those voices, even for just a little while each day, Staying Sharp would never have come to be. Why would I seek to live my life in accord...

I've been thinking about my career lately. Looking back over the thirty-five years since my first novel was published. Looking forward to … what? And to how much longer? No answers there, only a clear desire. That I will have enough passion, enough hope for the world that comes after me, and enough insight to go on writing for whatever years remain. A long career at work...

"Are you writing anything?" people often ask. It is, I assume, just a conversation starter when they can't think of a better way to begin. My response is usually, "I'm always writing something. I like to eat." But then, while eating is part of the issue, of course—writing is, after all, the way I earn my living—it is hardly all of it. I write the way I breathe,...

When I began writing fiction for young people in the mid-seventies, I had absorbed one of the most basic rules for such books through reading contemporary novels for young people: keep the adults at bay. No comforting–or scolding–adult voices narrating the story as was standard in the 19th century. In fact, few adults allowed on the scene, certainly none solving the...

I am about a third of the way into writing a young-adult novel called Blue-Eyed Wolf, far enough in to feel a sense of accomplishment, far enough from the end to still have some apprehension about making it the whole way. But a problem has begun to develop. As I sit down to work each day I find myself feeling increasingly claustrophobic, as though I’m being caught into a...

That was the headline on a news story on NPRs “All Things Considered” last week. Oh, no, I thought. Everything, especially it seems about children’s books, is always coming to a cataclysmic end. I am, frankly, weary of the hysteria. I suppose, too, at the age of 73 and in the latter part of a long career, I feel somewhat insulated against these changes. My...

I've been asked the question many times, almost always by non-writers. Or if the question comes from a writer it is, for certain, from one who hasn't yet been published. "What do you need editors for? What right does anyone have to tell you how you should write your story?" The best analogy I can think of as to why writers need editors is that it's the same as singers relying...

I have received letters from adults indignant about my novel, A Very Little Princess (the first of two stories about a tiny china doll), because, again, it is so sad . . . and for, presumably, a younger audience than On My Honor. But I wonder, though we all cherish happy endings, especially it seems adults cherish happy endings in stories intended for children, are happy...

I got the idea for this blog when I was meditating this morning. Yes, I know, I'm not supposed to get ideas meditating. In fact, that's supposed to be a time for leaving ideas behind. But when my mind loses its quiet focus on my breath and skitters off to someplace else, ideas about what to write or how to fix something I'm currently writing are one of the more productive...

How many times have I said it to my students and to other developing writers? When you're publishing a book, celebrate every step of the way, because if you don't celebrate the small moments, you rarely arrive at one that feels big enough to justify loud rejoicing. (Okay. If you win a Newbery or a National Book Award you get a party. Short of that, one moment in the life of...

I’ve just returned from a research trip for the young-adult novel I’m working on, Blue-Eyed Wolf. Well, actually, it was a mixture of a research trip and a retreat with a friend who needed some time away from home to concentrate on her writing. We went to Gunflint Lodge, a marvelous old Minnesota resort on the Gunflint Trail north of Lake Superior. The time we spent...

Not every story has to be lived to be written. That's what imagination is for. If writers are going to produce more than one or two novels, they are probably going to have to extend their experience through the most readily available source . . . reading. I need to do research in order to be able to write many of my novels. Some of that research, as I wrote last week, has been...

Last week I mentioned that every story springs from the writer's own longing. Even the most careful readers would find it impossible to assemble the facts of my life from my stories, but they would have little difficulty peering into my soul. The longing each story is built upon provides an exceedingly transparent window. Some elements of my stories come from small, if once...

I've been talking about fictional character as illusion, created out of my own psyche or borrowed from the world around me. I find it a fascinating concept to sort, even after nearly forty years of writing fiction. The question of how characters are brought to seeming life is never fully answered, partly because the process changes from writer to writer and story to story and...

When my daughter was ten or eleven, she used to say from time to time, “Mom, write a book about me. You could call it Heavens to Elisabeth.” “Beth-Alison,” I’d say, “I can’t write a book about you. I don’t know you well enough.” “Oh, Mom,” she’d say, in utter disgust, and that was the end of the discussion....